Thrik

Yes, the sound card getting raped would be my most obvious guess at why your GF sound is screwed. There is, however, another issue with sound that has similar symptoms -- total freeze of game in the same place every single time, repeating sound, never recovers. It's down to files on the GF cd itself somehow getting damaged, which you can test by simply attempting to copy all the .lab files from the CD to your hard-drive. If it gives you a cyclic redundancy check error, your CD's files have somehow been botched. This seems to happen to a lot of GF cds though, including mine. Perhaps the original batch used cheap CDs which die easily or something. The only real fix is to get somebody with a functioning CD to send you the files which won't allow themselves to be copied to your HD, or download a copy of the game and import them from that.

Yeah, I think cussing out Broken Sword because it's not funny is a bit daft, since it's not exactly supposed to be a laughathon like a certain other developer's adventure games. I enjoyed the more serious tone of it. I didn't hugely like BS3, though. I'm more referring to the original two, and the general gaming culture back then. All the other adventure games I played were totally humour driven and such, so it made a nice break to go to something more serious. Nowadays it's not so though, since pretty much every game has a serious tone. ¬

Tee. :~

Yeah, as promised. Pretty much every server ever is being hammered, though the Games Domain mirror seems to be allowing me a steady download that's at my connection max-out. I've heard the following initial impressions: 1) The AI is somewhat impressive. 2) The game is somewhat creepy. 3) The game somewhat runs like shit. 4) The game is somewhat cool. 5) The demo is somewhat short. Can't wait to find out for myself! Only 20 minutes left on the download. ¬

From a Geforce perspective, the most affordable card would be either a 6600GT or a 6800GT. The latter is more expensive, in that it is both a 256mb card and will run pretty much anything flawlessly. The 6600Gt on the other hand is only 128mb, but will run pretty much anything flawlessly otherwise. The catch being that the 128mb less of memory means you won't have as much bandwidth for textures, which in turns means that there's a high possibility of you having to lower your textures in the most recent games such as Battlefield 2 to medium rather than high. The 6600GT is however cheap, with me getting mine for only £140 when it was brand new, around a half year ago -- it'll be more around £100 ($180) now. Since the 7th series of Geforce cards has just started retailing, the 6th series will see a price drop -- it's a good time to invest in one. While I do get along fine with my 6600gt, if you can spare the extra finance I'd recommend going for the 6800gt instead -- that extra 128mb of memory will guarantee your smooth running of any games for a good while, at least until games start demanding 8th series technology. I get Psychonauts running totally flawlessly, silky smooth, and with smooth anti-aliasing to remove all those horrible jagged edges with the following setup: AMD Athlon XP 2800+ 1gb ddram Geforce 6600gt (128mb) ATI or Nvidia, totally up to you!

Yeah, I really can't advise playing it without pixel shading -- something which pretty any recent game will demand. If the card isn't even new enough to come with it on the GPU, then the chances of the card being able to run Psychonauts at a reasonable framerate are very slim.

I hope the stalkers can go a bit faster than they do in the ending sequence of HL2. ¬¬

Yes, this application is great. I look forward to the actual game, where I can put George Stobbart, Hitler and various others into an epic. PS: This is the type of thing that MMO games need.

Battlefield 2 would be a big recommendation, but as with most good games it requires at least one purchase. Counter-Strike may be a free mod, but as said above you'll still need a legitimate Half-Life (2) to play it online. The only time you'll be charged just to play online is with MMORPG games though, unless you count buying the game in the first place as paying to play online, you dirty scoundrel. ;

Fortunately the game itself has practically no real interface supposedly, along the same lines as Black & White (2). Good job too, because this one is way too big, bulky and just annoying.

Hey guys, did you know that if you download some mod you can view a sex minigame with your ingame girlfriend? Talk about hot.

Just click yes. You don't have to.

Choose!

From know on I will use the term "multiple player".

I don't know why this has really been turned into a preference, though. I'd rather both games just did it better, which could easily be done by combining the fun repetitive tasks with the fun rewards. Sadly, I doubt we'll be seeing BGAE given a chance to do it a bit better. :~~~~~~~~~

Luggage was really easy to find, and you got concept art for it. ¬

Yes. I was really enjoying the whole photography thing, until actually bothering with it became fairly incentiveless. Call me primitive, but I don't usually do things which border upon exploratory grinding like that without a clear reason to.

What sick freak ticked option 2?

I didn't just say that at all. ;

Economy. To ensure that you wouldn't buy the garage parts in the wrong order, you'd really need some kind of restriction to ensure that you don't end up with a million pearls in the earlier stages of the game -- otherwise you could just spend some time doing side-quests early on, and then go empty the place. And also, again to ensure that it's bought in the right order, they need to considerably increase the amount required for different parts as you go on. There's no doubt that they have gone around this in a different way, since it does seem a bit weird getting so many pearls at once, but I wouldn't call it a symptom of rushing -- merely a dodgy design decision. A better way to go about it would have been to simply have different objects hold different worth at the garage. For example, a pearl or few gets you the cheapest vehicle parts, but for the juicier stuff you need more valuable items in a similar quantity. These juicier items would of course not be findable until the later stages of the game, when the storyline permits the purchasing of those parts. It could possibly even be tied into the storyline, where you come across objects in new regions of the world which only open up during the later IRIS missions. I'm not thinking of making it really linear where you just get, say, an ultra valuable dragon tooth when you complete the slaughterhouse, but perhaps side quests which lead to such an object would open up then. Man, what a tangent.

I feel the need to again point out the coolness of the chase sequence while escaping from that dodgy pearl place in the town.

So you didn't like it. What do you want us to say? That you're wrong? That your opinions of games are totally flawed? That you have no right to call yourself a gamer? BGAE is so well loved quite simply because of how well it's all put together, and how immersive the general atmosphere of the game is. If you didn't feel that way while playing it, well okay, fair enough. There's no hidden aspect to the game that you missed and that we're all aware of, it evidently just didn't click. It happens. Just like some people have played Grim Fandango, then come up to me and been all "that was a bit shit". Well okay, actually, I don't think that has ever happened. But yes, shame you didn't like BGAE.

It intrigues me that in the trailer it seemed to show all sorts of crazy stuff in that diner, though. Do you go back there later, or did they just chop out a lot of potential routes in the demo? Man. Definitely a game for me to watch, though.